Sarah Elizabeth
Global e-commerce sales volume has been blowing up in the past several years, skyrocketing from nearly $695 billion in 2013 to a whopping $1.5 trillion in 2018. But with this explosive growth comes tough competition, and merchants must find better ways to stand out from the crowd and increase their reach.
When done right, Google AdWords – a paid online-search placement opportunity that helps retailers rise above organic search results – is a popular, cost-effective way to increase e-commerce business.
But managing a Google AdWords campaigns means managing a lot of moving parts. Here are so
Setting Up Campaigns: A Critical First Step
Before you set up an AdWords campaign, you must first identify the goal you’re trying to achieve. For example, you might be hoping to grow sales, or you might want to increase brand awareness. Your goal will shape everything you do in AdWords.
Once you’ve identified your campaign goal, you’re ready to specify the following elements:
- Target market. What do you know about the people you want to attract to your website? Can you specify a targeted age, gender or education level?
- Where do you want to display ads? Don’t pay for ads in overseas markets if you’re not shipping there.
- Don’t forget to include negative keywords, which are search terms you want to exclude from your campaigns, to make sure you’re not wasting money on the wrong kinds of traffic. For example, if you sell children’s shoes, you may want to exclude “women’s shoes” from your campaign. This will help increase the relevance of traffic to your site.
Making smart choices upfront can maximize your return on investment down the road. But remember, you should regularly review these choices to ensure they remain in line with your business’s goals.
Maintain Campaigns by Incorporating Available Tools
Once you’ve established your initial campaigns, maintaining them is critical to continued success. By objectively evaluating your results, it’s easy to identify – and reinvest in – the campaigns that are successful. Consider incorporating these tools and features within AdWords:
- Create seasonal campaigns. Separating campaigns by season and increasing their priority offers the flexibility to manage keyword bids and budgets for specific items without affecting other established campaigns.
- Implement custom labels. When you create segmented product groups in a campaign, you can adjust bids for only certain labels rather than the entire campaign.
- Research the competition. What keywords are the highest-placing ads using? And how do their ads compare to yours? Doing some market research will help you identify the right keywords and optimize your ads. This can help not only to improve your ad score and get your ad placed higher on the page, but also to improve your conversions and help you meet your goals.
- Use the right ad type. Make sure you’re selecting the ad type with the cost, reach and retention that matches your target audience and your business goals.
- Use ad extensions. Extensions let you include more information than normally fits in a standard text ad, which can improve your performance and click-through rate and attract customers. Take advantage of every option Google offers you to place more copy and more links in front of searchers!
- Create remarketing lists. Just because a visitor came to your website and left without making a purchase doesn’t mean it’s a lost opportunity. Set up an AdWords remarketing campaign to reengage with these visitors and rekindle their interest in your products by creating ads that automatically serve up either the original items the visitor was looking at or related products.
Taking Google AdWords Management to the Next Level
Succeeding with AdWords requires frequent keyword updating and constant campaign monitoring. Through a broad range of robust tools, AdWords lets you maximize spend and reach, gain insight and optimize ROI.
Don’t rely solely on these features, though. You must ensure that you’re also:
- Optimizing your website and creating well-defined landing pages. Not only will improved landing pages increase the chance they’ll convert to a sale or lead, they’ll also minimize your cost per click. And because mobile commerce is skyrocketing, Google heavily weighs mobile-friendliness in its new ranking algorithm.
- Monitoring acquisition cost. Remember that clicks don’t always mean sales, so ensure your acquisition cost for customers isn’t more than the average purchase. If it is, test and revise both your copy and keywords to lower the cost of customer acquisition.
- Increasing your use of relevant long-tail keywords. These are the keywords that users search for late in the buying process. Although they may result in lower search volume, they also result in lower cost-per-click bids. In the long run, the better you understand your ideal customer, the better you can refine your long-tail keywords. Plus, more specific keywords result in less competition, more success and better value.
- Tracking conversions. Don’t overlook implementing the tracking code necessary to measure specific actions visitors take after they click on your ad. This might be a click to submit a form on a landing page, viewing a specific web page, or even making a phone call on a Google phone number. This will allow you to understand the true return your campaigns are generating. By understanding the cost of each conversion, you’re able to better manage your campaigns and plan future investments accordingly.
Grow Your Business With Targeted Campaigns and Fraud Protection Solutions
While setting up a Google AdWords campaign is straightforward, running a successful campaign requires dedicated time and effort. When you understand the full value of Google AdWords, you’re poised to capitalize on current opportunities and capture future ones.
As you grow your e-commerce business, ensure you’re not putting your growing profits at risk of unchecked credit card fraud. Integrating a fraud protection solution will help you approve more transactions and protect your online sales against the rising threat of card-not-present fraud.
Talk with a ClearSale credit card fraud analyst today to learn how our multilayered approach can help you prevent fraud attacks while increasing orders.
